When you go to Jita, you sell to humans, you buy from humans, you are scammed by humans. There's a player flying that mile-long cargoship currently eclipsing the sun, and for that matter the other 17 giant fucking scifi transports dotted around your screen.

It looks like something out of Babylon 5 or a Star Wars "crowd shot", but none of it is staged. Everyone is there for their own reasons, and you might never know what it is.

EVE Online is a space-based Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, created by Icelandic company CCP Games. Players take the role of a new breed of elite spaceship pilots — "capsuleers", named for the mechanism they use to control their ships, in a far distant future setting where four galactic empires, numerous player corporations/alliances and a number of NPC factions vie for control and influence.

Unlike most MMOs, the player base is not divided into different stand-alone servers, but coexists in a single universe. EVE Online contains almost 8,000 solar systems, each with their own planetary system and asteroid belts. EVE's record for logged-in accounts currently stands at over 64,000 simultaneous connections.

Perhaps partially inspired by Origin's Wing Commander: Privateer and the old 8-bit classic Elite - as well, flavorfully, a slightly grittier Star Trek - EVE gives new players a ship, a handful of credits (Inter Stellar Kredits or "ISK"note which just happens to be the currency code for the Icelandic króna ), and a very large sandbox to play in. It's possible to be a pirate, a stock-market mogul, a mercenary, a trader, an explorer, a miner, a manufacturer, or any other profession that you can justify within the game mechanics. Not to mention what you can do for fun in your free time.

EVE occasionally pops up in the gamingpress (and sometimes the mainstream press) for extraordinary feats of sabotage, theft and other devious exploits carried out by a player or group of players. Feats like this, that might get the responsible group banned in about any other MMO, are legal gameplay in EVE and these events become player-generated Crowning Moments of Awesome. EVE was in fact created by former players of Ultima Online in response to its restrictions on PVP and Griefingnote such as Trammel, the notoriety system, labeling potions so you can't give newbies purple ones to watch 'em blow up, etc... - in other words, the main selling point of EVE is the ability to apply Video Game Cruelty Potential to other players.

As a result, EVE is known for having not so much a learning curve as a learning cliff◊ - though later updates have smoothed things out for new players considerably. One EVE blogger/podcaster calls the game "a sandbox with landmines" due to the often brutal Player Versus Player focus of the game. It keeps some potential players away, but many players see it as a good thing, on the assumption that you have to be at least halfway competent to survive in the game.

The ongoing backstory of EVE is written in regular in-character news articles as well as semi-regular Chronicles, a few short stories, two novellas and three novels, two of which are linked to the novellas. Many of the tropes that reference NPC characters come from these sources.

EVE is the first online game to have its own democratically elected (real world) player oversight committee, known as the Council of Stellar Management, the members of which serve one-year terms, as of the fifth CSM. The CSM is flown to CCP's Iceland headquarters, where they meet with CCP engineers, present players' concerns, and discuss future features and expansions of the game. They also help mediate between CCP and the player community in case of scandals. As with other parts of any massive community the CSM has moments of drama between themselves and with the larger playerbase (also often seen as a good thing).

There is now also a (sadly cancelled) PS3-exclusive FPS tie-in known as DUST 514(link) which allows players to play as mercenaries engaging in Faction Warfare on planet surface, with the option to call for assistance from the EVE players with Orbital Bombardment.

In 2013, a second spin off game, a Oculus Rift exclusive multiplayer Dogfighting shooter named EVE Valkyrie has been announced for a 2014 release, allowing players to fight each-other in real-time first-person ship-to-ship combat for the first time, with integration into the main game similar to Dust 514. It has finally been announced to be shipping with the Oculus Rift Founders Pack.

A series of tie-in novels have also been released- one, called The Empyrean Age is a sci-fi political intrigue action novel that jumps perspective frequently and shows how the galaxy wide-war in the opening began. It has a sequel which follows some characters from the first book, named Templar One, which is much more action focused, dropping a lot of the cast and becoming a lot darker as it explores the idea that War Is Hell.

In 2013, Dark Horse Comics announced that It would begin work on a series of comic books detailing the real life exploits of players from the perspective of their player characters inside the game based on the "True Stories In EVE Online" forum set up by CCP during the 10th year anniversary celebration of EVE Online. On February 19th 2014 they released their first comic "EVE Online: True Stories #1", the story of New Eden's mostly highly publicized event of the destruction of the Band Of Brothers alliance at the hands of goonswarm and the Mittani.

As propaganda by player entities about player entities is a major part of EVE Online's ever-evolving metagame - and even its history, as it is remembered by most players, is typically in part written by the winners - all trope descriptions concerning players, player corporations, alliances and coalitions should probably be taken with a grain of salt.

This game provides examples of:

2-D Space: Ships can move in any direction, but bizarrely, there seems to be a universal "up" — stations are all oriented the same way, for instance. And most players pretty much ignore up and down, to the point where high or low areas are commonly used to hide ships that are too big to dock. Ships that aren't moving automatically level themselves at a right angle to "galactic north". Turns out the game made it to beta testing without any of these conveniences, but it was discovered the lack of direction made players feel lost and insecure and the developers became concerned that the game was too hardcore.

Aborted Arc: Only the Amarr and Caldari COSMOS missions are in a state remotely resembling completion, and only then because they were the first to be released. Gallente and Minmatar COSMOS suffer from bugged missions in the middle of lengthy chains, and some of the nullsec COSMOS missions don't even have descriptions.note For the time being, it appears that COSMOS has been utterly abandoned in favor of the better-received Epic Arcs. A devblog has stated that they have a team working on this.

Absent Aliens: There's plenty of flora and fauna, but nothing sapient. And most of the aliens are actually just far-future humans, anyway. Borderline cases include:

The Jove, who were certainly human once but bio-engineering has changed them dramatically.

The Sleepers; far as can be told, they're descended from an ancient human civilization that predate the current ones and whose artifacts can be found in New Eden (Minmatar space particularly), but no one really knows for sure what they are now. There have been Sleeper sightings in wormhole space currently, but those are believed to be drone vessels, so there's still no information on whether the actual species still exists or not.

Rogue Drones, Gallentean creations that evolved their own form of semi-intelligence and live in hives. See below.

One single supposedly alien craft is seen briefly in a level I or II security mission. The flavor text for the same mission notes that UFOs are occasionally reported by space vessels but most are chalked up to jove or antique star ships like Sansha's nation.

After-Action Report: No single hub for them but popular reading topics on Eve forums, written for PVP battles, usually in the context of corp/alliance wars.

Killmails are used as exactly this, but very bare-bones by the standards of an AAR.

A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Rogue Drones. The Gallenteans have historically been innovators in artificial intelligence, with their society relying heavily on automation and ubiquitous computing. As such, the trend towards increasing autonomy and plurifunctionality of space-based remote drone technology seemed a given; however, when a few prototype drones escaped their research environments and managed to hitch a ride in passing starships, reprogramming the ships' own drone compliments with their new software before taking them over and reproducing advanced copies of themselves, a galaxy-wide pest problem was result. CONCORD treaties now ban research on superintelligent autonomous AI, and the trend in research has moved towards interfacing artificial intelligence with human intelligence, such as Capsuleers.

Allegedly Free Game: DUST 514 will be a free-to-play game.note read this as "a lot of money from EVE" It was initially considered to be as a regular CD (think Electronic Arts' latest games having an "Online Pass"), but was scrapped along development. Instead, this will have microtransactions, such as slightly tweaked weapons and armor.

One feature of the game is that regular EVE players will be able to interact with Dust players on-planet worlds, with orbital bombardment by ships in EVE having been demonstrated at the 2012 EVE Fanfest. This could put those without at least a connection with someone who pays at a massive disadvantage.

Alternative Calendar: The game uses a modified Gregorian calendar called YC (Yulai Conference), with a zero point slightly over 100 years in the game's past, the year in which the empires formed CONCORD and the calendar standardized. 2012 corresponds to the in-game year 114.

An Entrepreneur Is You: The economy of Eve is entirely player run. Players can form corporations which make money from activities as varied as trade (both selling long and hauling), manufacturing, mercenary work and even banking.

Take a brief moment to consider this. Every single item in the game, other than basic items, quest rewards, and blueprints, has been made by a player, from materials mined by a player... It boggles the mind! Every bit of basic kit/loot you sell, is bought by another player. If no one wants it, you can't sell it. If you want a new ship, you'd better hope someone is manufacturing them...

And I Must Scream: What happens, according to Word of God, when a capsuleer is disconnected from their pod incorrectly. Called Jovian Wetgrave Syndrome you are able to feel all sensation (hearing, sight, taste, touch, smell) but your brain looses all ability to send signals to the rest of your body. At this point medical science incorrectly labels you a vegetable and slates you for a mercy killing. Whats the most common way of getting rid of a dead or brainless body in space? Incineration.

Anti-Poop Socking: Skills are trained in real-time, at a speed based on the player's attributes. This understandably leads many to assume that older players have an unbeatable lead over new ones, but in truth the number of skills for any given task is very much finite; particularly since all skills cap at level five. Focusing on a specific skillset, such as maxing out one's abilities in a particular ship class, can easily result in six-month-old characters who utterly destroy four-year veterans in single combat.

Asteroid Miners: The economy is fueled by the players mining a variety of asteroid types, whose ores are then refined and used in the construction of a huge amount of ship upgrades, ammunition, and the ships themselves.

Attack Drone: Favoured weapons of the Gallente. Other races mostly use them as secondary weapons, typically but not exclusively for dealing with frigate-sized ships.

As of Retribution, the Amarr are also being worked into a drone-favoring race, now having hulls of almost all sizes that gives bonuses to drones, though not as strong as the Gallente's.

Truth in television? Pistachios nuts are a restricted cargo on ships due to their propensity for spontaneous combustion in large quantities.

Artistic License – Economics: The friendly Pend insurance company will compensate the loss of a ship whether you destroyed it in an accident, or even if you didn't buy a policy. How they stay in business is one of the mysteries of the Eve universe.

Ascended Meme: Caldari ECM ship the Falcon was long viewed as overpowered and "Because of Falcon" became a stock phrase explaining why things went wrong among the EVE Community. CCP recognised this in two sets of patch notes:

"A phantom Tempest silhouette will no longer appear when piloting a Legion and activating any of the modules. Minmatar scientists are convinced this was happening BECAUSE OF FALCON."

— CCP, Patchnotes for Apocrypha 1.1

"Additionally, CONCORD has declared all “BECAUSE OF FALCON” jokes passé."

The various Titan Doomsday Devices, which have a face melting base attack power of two million damage. The flip side is that it immobilizes your ship for half a minute and offlines cloaking, jump drives, and the doomsday device itself for ten minutes, making the Titan nothing but a sitting duck.

The Doomsday Weapon used to be broken in that it was basically a giant stupidly overpowered Smart Bomb, able to vaporize hundreds of enemy ships in one stroke (and crash the server sometimes because of the lag.) Dominion nerfed the weapon to be single-target only but upped the damage. The Crucible expansion has nerfed it even further by not allowing it to be fired on ships that aren't Capital Ships.

The Talos, the Gallente Tier-3 battlecruiser. Designed to mount a full rack of eight battleship-grade hybrid weapons, with its bonuses optimized for large particle blasters, it is the ultimate sub-capital sustained damage-dealer ... in theory. The problem is that in order to throw the insane damage it's designed for, it has get to point-blank range, and without the defenses you'd find on a battleship or capital ship, it needs to be flown with skill and a good helping of luck, or it's likely to get melted by defensive fire before it gets close enough for those blasters to do more than scorch the enemy's paint job.

Any limited run ship like Alliance Tournament prize ships, or any ship otherwise difficult to obtain (namely, the Revenant supercarrier). Cool ships, generally have good models and good bonuses, but because of their inherently limited nature, they're extremely valuable as hangar trophies and losing even one is a serious blow to your wallet at the least. In some cases, Alliance Tournament ships have gone for sums that could be used to pay half the cost of a titan.

Titans themselves. Situationally useful for bridging fleets to distant systems, they're fairly worthless in actual combat. Even with doomsdays, they can be melted by determined subcaps and dreadnought fleets.

Badass Normal: Nedar. Works for an insanely cutthroat drug-dealing corpoartion, successfully engages in suicide missions on a regular basis, maintains a relationship with two women at once, manages to outwit a treacherous member of his fleet and defeats a capsuleer.

Cloning tech is usually described as not something you can just wear as a backpack, but breaks from this exist; it also makes killing off background characters difficult.

The Battlestar: The Guardian-Vexor, a Gallente cruiser special edition ship that can field up to 10 drones at once. Also, a certain skill used to allow control of extra drones up to 10 total drones at once, though this has since been changed to a 20% per level damage bonus.

Bio-Augmentation: The Jove are masters of this, to the point it's debatable if they're human any longer; they've made themselves superhuman and engineered away their emotions. They also gave the Caldari clone tech for reasons known only to them.

The Chronicle A Beautiful Face deals with a company who has developed the technology to swap faces into anything a person wants. When Walking In Stations (now officially "Incarna") is released this tech will probably be available to the player characters to justify character customization.

Black Market: The "Unholy Rage" banning of over 6000 macro accounts in June 22, 2009. Led to a timer being placed on the forums as the macro miners sought revenge. Extensively examined by the lead economist at fanfest.

In-Universe, the manufacture of drugs, including combat boosters, is a trade that a few players have taken up. CONCORD is allowed to shoot you for carrying contraband (but actually detecting them is chancy). Most pirate factions have fingers in the black market and Intaki Syndicate, though not pirates, depend on the black market for their livelihood since when they were kicked out of the Federation, they were forbidden to settle planets.

Blue and Orange Morality: Because they treat bodies as little more than shells and wield spaceships capable of killing tens of thousands of people in a few minutes, any capsuleer who claims to have moral standards will almost inevitably end up like this, even if they don't realize it. A lot of capsuleers avoid this problem by simply not even trying.

Nuclear ammunition for projectile and missile weapons exists in the game, and capsuleers of the same corporation will occasionally fire on or destroy each other "for the lulz" or as training. Consider what this means in terms you may be more familiar with: capsuleers will use nuclear weapons for entertainment.

Goonfleet's rules seem to be something like this. Do whatever you want to the "pubbies" and the enemies, but God help you if you fuck with another goon.

The Jove also qualify. Completely isolated, equipped with technology far beyond anything possessed by the empires, and they have altered themselves so thoroughly that they are no longer naturally aggressive.

Boring but Practical: Frustrated by the lackluster performance of their missile defense batteries, many high security Caldari station managers turned to their other racial weapon, the ECM battery. The result was the dickstar, a defense designed to literally bore attackers off the battlefield by ensuring they wouldn't achieve target lock for more than five to ten seconds at a time. Since ships with ECM immunity aren't allowed in high security space, only the most persistent pirates continued to attack them.

Also, mining tends to be the most reliable way to make money (to build replacements for all those ships that keep getting blown up), but it can be mind-numbingly tedious. Fortunately, the game has an in-client web browser...

Alternately, you can haul things from one planet to another, play the market, refine and sell ore and metals, or any number of other things that are, potentially, just as boring as mining to someone who doesn't care for such details. Mining actually isn't all that efficient of a revenue gathering method; it is, however, a reasonably reliable one (barring griefers or pirates) and one that you can potentially do even if you have somehow literally lost everything you own, since the free ship you get as a mercy if you have nothing else comes fitted to mine.

ECM ships in general are this. Logistics pilots also don't have the most exciting jobs (forsome) but they're critical to fleet success.

"PVP Economics" (manipulating the market in manufacturing, buying, selling, and monopolizing) is tedious and can be frustrating but it can always be an efficient way of making money without risk of being killed.

Bribing Your Way to Victory: To a limited extent. PLEX (game time codes) can be sold on the in-game market for massive amounts of ISK. The "cheating" potential is curbed by the fact that you need skills to use ships and equipment effectively, and the training can't be hastened. Nonetheless, there are a number of tales of wars being funded with PLEX, with "Russian Aluminum Magnate" having become something of a shorthand term.

On the other hand, due to the nature of the game there is no ship or fitting that is perfect for any scenario, so there isn't much benefit to paying more to get the best modules. With this in mind most players that are serious about PvP do not equip top of the line "officer" modules because that's just so much more money they're going to lose when their ship is blown up.

Can Only Move the Eyes: How Sansha's nation abducts planetary population. Nanites attack the motor neurons in the neck, causing the victim to walk out into the open where they are scooped up by tractor beams. Victims can scream all the while this is happening.

Cap: By design there is no (theoretical) limit on the number of players that can be present in any given system. They did make a single exception for the Jita system, a very popular trade hub in CONCORD-protected space due to its popularity occasionally overloading the server, but the cap is so high and the server has been better optimized since the cap was placed that it is rarely a consideration.

The battle of Caldari Prime during Retribution was one such exceptional circumstance. CONCORD heavily restricted traffic leading into the system to avoid server overload leaving the gates at surrounding systems clogged with ships.

The Battle of HED-GP was so huge and caused so much lag, that "Time Dilation" went into effect in order to protect the server. Time slowed down, leaving hundreds of players waiting for hours to jump into the system, and ships trying to jump out utterly defenseless as they waited to warp out.

Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: The Ammatar seem to suffer from this. They were originally the seventh tribe of the Minmatar, the Nefantar. Historically, their collusion with the Amarrian subjugation of the other tribes earned them the contempt and enmity of their former brethren - then a large number of them stabbed the Amarr in the back to save the remnants of another tribe. Then, some of the turncoats switch sides again and rejoined the Ammatar who had remained loyal.

In the game, habitual corp thieves quite obviously suffer from this - and most people who've betrayed just one corporation will automatically be assumed to, whether or not they actually do.

City Guards: The Concord Fleet, who will warp in and destroy any player that breaks their laws in high-security space (aka a "Concorddoken", delivered by "Pwncord"). CCP considers evading CONCORD's retribution to be an exploit due to their extreme power, and the overall fact that they'd be horribly ineffective City Guards if a player could avoid the repercussions of doing stupid crap in CONCORD space.

Concord is so strict. Pirates have convinced orca pilots to rep them, then fired on someone (sometimes the orca) and gotten both concorded. Pirate for the obvious reason. Orca for assisting the pirate, even if the orca was fired on. This has been patched as of the Crucible expansion. Any repper you have running will automatically turn off, and you'll be warned if you turn it back on.

Cloning Gambit: The players. After getting podded a player's consciousness (or at least some of the memories) is transferred to a new clone body.

Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Each faction has a color scheme for all their ships. The thumbnails for each ship even use a nebula background of the ship's faction's color.

For icons and nebulae: Gallente are green, Caldari are blue, Minmatar are maroon, and Amarr are gold.

For ships: Caldari ships are bluish grey, Minmatar a dirty brown, Amarr shiny gold/tan, and Gallente light greenish grey with dark tinted detailing, Jovians are green (but rarely seen and not accessible to players). Tech 2 variants are typically color-coded based on the NPC manufacturer, while faction ships are usually in some form of camo pattern.

For Missiles and Bombs: Green/Dark Green is Kinetic, Red is Thermal, Yellow/Beige is Explosive and Light Blue is EM.

Continuing Is Painful: Forgot to keep your clone and insurance up-to-date? You can lose weeks of training and billions of ISK with some ships. Particularly a capital ship or T2/T3. Or if you have faction/officer fittings. Or if you have a set of pirate implants in your pod.

New "Tech 3" ships in the game's March 2009 expansion, Apocrypha, cost players skill points in the skills required for the subsystems of those ships if they get blown up with the player inside. At worst, it takes about 5 days to train back up. How much this hurts you depends on your understanding of opportunity cost (time lost training subsystem skills you could be training something else).

Rhea removed the clone grades, removing one of the consequences of losing a pod. However, you'll still lose your implants if you get podded, and the T3 cruiser skill loss is still in effect.

Cool Starship: Naturally, given the premise of the game, New Eden has any and every sort of funky spacecraft you might possibly hope for. Gutsy and deceptively powerful rustbuckets? The Minmatar Republic's got you covered. Ancient, ornate relics of a bygone era? The Amarr Empire's where it's at. Gleaming techno-miracles? Well, good sir/madam/renegade artificial intelligence, we've got two flavours - mechanical, angular and functional from the Caldari State, and organic, sleek, and luxurious from the Gallente Federation. Not only that, but they come in all shapes and sizes, from tiny, lightning-fast frigates through big, clunky mining ships all the way up to the kilometres-long dreadnoughts and Titans. Long story short, there's something for everyone, and if nothing else scratches your itch, Tech III cruisers will let you essentially build your own.

The Con: Because of the hands off approach of CCP regarding player interactions many stories of legendary cons, scams, and other debauchery are abound in EVE.

Copy And Paste Environments: The station environments are precisely the same for every station belonging to a particular race - even to that race's assigned pirate faction.

Space is also like this. The nebulae and starfields seen in the background of each system don't change much. Which makes sense, they're probably the same ones.

Notably used to good effect in the Crucible expansion. Each Empire region has it's own nebula, and a pilot familiar with them can navigate almost solely based on how far away each is.

Corrupt Quartermaster: Player corporations (read: guilds) need players with logistics skills to move supplies where they're needed. This is vitally important but very boring grunt work that not many players want to do when they could be blowing up other players instead. So those that volunteer often are not background-checked properly before they're put into a position to siphon off massive amounts of goods that were supposed to be headed to a war effort.

Crapsack World: In New Eden, billions are enslaved by the Amarr Empire under less than humane conditions and there is nothing anyone can do about it. In the Caldari State you are born into a megacorporation, and if you get fired or quit you will starve to death because no way are you getting another job and they're not too keen on the idea of welfare. The Caldari Provist and Loyalist movements constantly at each other's throats threatening a brutal civil war haven't helped matters either. The Minmatar Republic has a standard of living comparable to Mexico, just barely better than when they were enslaved by the Amarr, and a young government rife with corruption and internal politics. Things ain't looking too peachy in the Gallente Federation anymore either since the start of the Empyrian War, between enemy Titans threatening their home system, the rise of a Secret Police to guard loyalty, a brief threat of civil war and dictatorship on the horizon of possibilities and the in-story effect of the Caldari occupying much of their low security systems currently. And god help you if you live on a ship or in capsuleer controlled space, because you now have a life expectancy of about five minutes.

Crippling Overspecialization: ships tend to have trouble hitting other ships that are smaller than them, so the worse are the largest ships. The fix is to use drones or other players in smaller ships. However Death of a thousand cuts isn't likely unless they're the kind with no armor.

The stated design philosophy behind most Tech II ships. The intent is for them to perform one task exceedingly well (interceptors for tackling, stealth bombers for sneak attacks on unsuspecting heavier ships, logistics ships for field repairs under fire, etc.), and fail hard if they're shoehorned into a role outside their specialty. (For example: a Black Ops battleship, designed for stealth operations, will usually not fare well against an equivalent Tech I battleship.)

Ship fits in general tend to be this. Even with the most versatile of ship hulls its always a good idea to swap out modules when if you want to use it for a different task. (Example: The Catalyst is often used by new players to run and salvage security missions, but it would be unwise to strap a salvager and six blasters to one and try to salvage wrecks as you fought off other ships.

In mid July of 2011, The LEETPVP coalition decided to invade Goonswarm's home sector of VFK with a large fleet of super-capital ships (Supercarriers and Titans, with logistic support — the biggest ships in the game), thinking that they could set up camp and cut Goonswarm's head off. Goonswarm responded with over 2000 sub-capital ships, calling in every ally they have in the game, all to that single sector, swarming over the new POSes the supercapitals were last seen hiding in, preventing them from running away. Less than 48 hours later, all the LEETPVP POSes were destroyed and LEETPVP are spending billions in sub-capital ships just to try and buy time for their supercapitals to flee.

How bad did the above get? 72 hours later, not only did they give up invading Goonspace, they are actively running across the universe to escape the wrath of the Goons.

History repeated itself in December 2011 when White Noise. (extraneous period intentional) alliance and friends declared they were (again) invading Goonswarm space, the speech declaring this making the statement "Deklein by February." Goon spies got wind of this and counter-invaded the region of Branch over Christmas. White Noise. were caught by surprise and failed to mount any successful defence of their region and were relieved of their teritory approximately two weeks later. ~words~

And now, the largest. Battle. In MMORPG history. Namely, the Battle of B-R5RB, in which 75 Titans (the biggest and most powerful ship class) overall were destroyed. 16 of those belonged to the Goonswarm-led CFC, the winning coalition. The other 59 belonged to the losing side (PL/N3). An even better kill ratio exists for supercarriers, and a still solid 2.5 for dreadnoughts, as can be seen in the battle report. Basically, while CFC did still lose massive amount of ships, it utterly curbstomped PL/N3.

As of February-May 2016, the rest of Eve Online banded together at the behest and payment of upset bankers and routed the Goonswarm-led Imperium (they rebranded from CFC). The Imperium lost numerous battles, all of their systems, and were camped into their evacuation point station for weeks on end. The Northern side of the map, the old Imperium ancestral homeland, is now inhabited by over 20 smaller alliances that participated in the defeat of Goonswarm.

Most fights the elite PvP alliance Rooks and Kings get into end up this way, almost always in their favor, despite usually being outnumbered at least two-to-one.

Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Capsuleers all suffer from this to some degree. The numerous cybernetic augmentations, spending time in isolation in their pods, and ill conceived notions of immortality can leave capsuleers emotionally stunted and awkward at best or completely callous/psychotic at worst.

Damn You, Muscle Memory: The point-and-click movement leaves many new players from other space games with direct controls confused. CCP noted this behavior and tried to avoid it in the Rhea update, which includes traditional arrowkey based movement as an option.

Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: If you keep your clone and insurance policies up to date. It still hurts more then other games, mind you; if you get a billion ISK (say about $40) worth of strategic cruiser shot out from under you, it's gone (and its wreck probably looted by the people who blew it up), and there's no insurance for the implants (potentially another billion ISK's worth) that got blasted out of your skull when they destroyed your escape pod.

Lampshaded in the forums in response to someone going Leeroy Jenkins against a hostile capital fleet with a single poorly-fitted dreadnaught and no backup:

Stupidity is not a survival trait.

Oh.

Dammit.

We're immortal.

Defenseless Transports: Industrial ships in are designed to transport large amounts of material and are virtually defenseless, having paper-thin armor and poor, if any, weapons. Taken to the extreme with freighters, the capital-class industial ships. While the regular industrials can at least fit some defense modules or weapons, freighters have no fitting slots whatsoever! (Although in practice freighters are actually much harder to destroy than regular industrials, as their much greater size gives them much more effective hit points than even a heavily tanked industrial).

Averted with the "Blockade Runner" class of Tech-II transport ships, which boast an inherent warp core strength modifier (making them harder to tackle) and a hit point potential rivaling a battlecruiser. They're designed to be able to survive long enough to escape a gate camp.

Deflector Shields: Equipped on all ships, the primary means of defense for Caldari and some Minmatar ships.

Diminishing Returns for Balance: Multiple damage or defense upgrades receive "stacking penalties". The first such module has full effect, the second approximately 80%, and after the third a fourth becomes near-pointless.

Dramatic Space Drifting: A major fleet fight could leave hundreds of wrecks in a space, ranging from the metal jumble of support ships to the drifting husks of capital ships, right down to the corpses of pilots who got podded. Of course these fields are often salvaged for loot and the corpses scooped as trophies.

Eagle Land: The Gallente - Everyone watches their TV, listens to their pop music and drinks their soft drinks. They like to bang on about freedom at every possible opportunity. And their government consists of a President, a Senate, and a Supreme Court. Sounds rather like America, except they're French.

Eldritch Starship: Invoked with the starship designs of Sansha's Nation, which were built to look as weird and alien as possible as an intimidation tactic... and also because Sansha Kuvakei is both very smart and utterly bugnuts insane. The Transhuman Aliens of the Jove Empire play it straighter with their enigmatic, quasi-organic, and astonishingly powerful craft, but probably the purest examples are the Sleeper Drones, the mysterious and horrifyingly potent mechanical guardians of a long-dead civilisation in the farthest, darkest reaches of wormhole space, which basically crawled out of the pages of a H.P. Lovecraft story.

The Empire: The Amarr Empire — aforementioned Catholic megalomaniacs with a serious hard-on for colonialism. Emperor Heiderran tried to tone it down (writing the Pax Amaria celebrating the Empire's opportunities to affect peace) and was awarded a prestigious Gallentean peace prize for it, but after his death from old age he's been replaced by a series of expansionists.

The End of the World as We Know It: Some players and groups attempt to bring about the an end to the game via killing every other player, destroying every other ship and generally acting like an Omnicidal Maniac. In theory they can actually succeed in this, but the game designers aren't worried as most people who try this get distracted by the game itself or get bored with it once the massive amount of time and effort required starts to sinks in.

Militas have declared temporary truces and even 0.0 alliances have participated...though in their case typically for the lulz.

Escape Pod: A player's capsule is ejected from their burning ship wreckage to give them a chance to escape. The capsules are fast, tiny, unarmed and effectively unarmored. The unseen crew on capsuleer and NPC ships are stated to have escape pods, though they are not seen in-game.

Even Evil Has Standards: Normally, scamming, grieving and general malice are positively encouraged, but it's completely forbidden to scam or grief CCP's charity fundraiser events.

In-game "legal" scamming, scheming and plotting are all done within the boundaries of the EULA and in-game rules. Sometimes, the in-game rules may be used or turned against the unfortunate victim, but hey, it's still legal according to the EULA!.

Griefing is technically illegal in the game, and more players than you think have been banned for it. Its just the CCP doesn't usually consider it griefing as long as you make a profit.

Evil vs. Evil: Most the Nullsec Alliance wars, if not most wars in game period, could be viewed as this. The war of BoB vs Goonswarm stands out especially though. Goonswarm is famous for griefing as many people as they can and once the Band of Brothers collapsed it was very clear they had been given significant aid from people inside CCP.

Excessive Steam Syndrome: The mining barges discharge smoke and flames from ports on their flanks. These exhaust pipes are always venting, even when docked in a station.

Explosions in Space: While the explosion particle effects actually look like the zero-G description the trope's page provides, many explosions also include a Planar Shockwave.

Explosive Overclocking: Pilots with the "Thermodynamics" skill are able to overheat active ship equipment, gaining percentage boosts to functionality at the expense of the modules taking heat damage over time, eventually rendering them inoperable.

Fantasy: In spite of being a Sci-Fi game, most of the game's factions name their ships and NPCs with some kind of mythical or fantasy-themed naming scheme. Part of this is due to Translation Convention: the Caldari don't know what a Raven is, for example, but they name that battleship after the bird with traits that the 21st century players would associate with ravens.

The Gallente Federation names all their ships after Greek and Mesopotamian deities or descriptive latin words.

The Minmatar Republic names all their ships after either forces of nature, violent acts, weapons, or Norse Mythology, plus a few Earth animals (One ship, called the Wolf is described as "Named after a mythical beast renowned for its voraciousness")

The Caldari State gives most of its ships bird names, with a few mythical creatures scattered around. All of its NPCs have Japanese and Finnish themed names.

Sansha's Nation and the Equilibrium of Mankind name all their NPCs after demons, monsters, and cultists.

The Blood Raiders name all their NPCs after religious titles and ghosts.

Fashionable Asymmetry: Almost all ships are asymmetric to varying degrees - some◊wildly◊so◊. Each faction has its own flavor of asymmetry - Caldari ships usually have symmetrical fuselages (The Moa and Blackbird were notable exceptions until their redesigns), with various do-dads and wings stuck on haphazardly. Minmatar ships typically have an overall symmetric body, with spars and solar panels on some of their larger ships being mounted off-center. Amarr ships are generally very symmetric, but when they do have asymmetry, one side of the ship ends up looking completely different from the other◊. Gallente ships are almost always hilariously lopsided, with engines nacelles protruding from weird positions and cockpits mounted on the sides of frigates.

The Sixth Ranger: King Khanid II, leader of the Khanid Kingdom, re-allied with the Amarr Empire.

Flame War: On the official forums, the Intergalactic Summit (IGS) forum is entirely in-character. This frequently results in roleplayed flame wars between the Amarr and Minmatar players. Or the Gallente and the Caldari players. Or the pirates vs the non pirates or the transhumanist anarchists vs. any of the empire supporters, or...

On the same, venture into "Corporation, Alliance, and Organization Discussion" (CAOD) at your own risk. It's player politics (particularly those of the space-holding alliances) with large doses of trolling and Serious Business.

Kicked into overdrive in Retribution before, during, and after The Battle of Caldari Prime between Gallente and Caldari players with many patriotic cries from both sides over who rightfully owns the Luminaire system.

The Battle Of Asakai, a giant war involving some 700 corporations and 3,000 ships, began with a simple misclick. An alliance was attacking an orbital tower in the Asakai system, in low-security space, expecting to be ambushed, and had reached out to the Goonswarm Federation for backup to ambush the ambush. The Goons had a strike force assembled in a nearby system, with a Titan standing by to open a jump bridge to the battle zone. The initial ambush was sprung, the Goons' allies deployed a cynosural field to give the counter-ambush a target, and the Titan pilot got ready to open the bridge ... but mis-clicked and triggered the Titan's jump drive instead, stranding the strike force at the assembly point, and dropping the Titan into a battle zone two jumps out of high-security space, with no escorts and a doomsday weapon that doesn't work outside of null-sec. The Titan got tackled, anti-Goon forces mobilized to get in on the kill, Goonswarm forces and allies deployed multiple Titans and other supercaps and support forces to protect their wayward pilot, people flooded into the Asakai system from all corners of the galaxy, and one of the largest battles in multiplayer gaming history was on.

The Battle of B-R5RB, taking place literally one year to the day after the The Battle of Asakai, was started because an alliance in the N3 Coalition missed a bill payment for the system where the Pandemic Legion was staging and storing their fleets. When sovereignty dropped across the system, the Clusterfuck Coalition (which includes the Goonswarm) and Russian Coalition jumped at the opportunity to destroy the station and capture the system.

The battle, the largest battle to take place in the game's history (for now) and was the largest PVP battle in gaming history. 7,548 players participated in the battle, and SEVENTY-FIVE TITANS WERE DESTROYED (smashing the previous record of titans destroyed in a single battle at 12) among the 4,286 exploded ships counted, estimated at approximately 11 TRILLION ISK ($300,000) in materials. The Doomsday lasers were fired 775 times, accounting for 24% of all Doomsdays fired in the game's history. The battle lasted 21 hours, and only ended due to daily server maintenance.

The in-game currency unit is the InterStellar Kredit. which happens to share an acronym with the Icelandic Króna (ISK).

PIRATE, as suggested in the Help channel once, is an acronym for Protector of Interstellar asteRoids And Their Environment. Their actions are, however, still not forgiven.

Outer Ring Excavations designed most of the ships in the dedicated mining classes.

Yulai Archives & Record Repository, the guys in charge of maintaining and improving the official EVE wiki.

Future Imperfect: The premise of Eve's backstory is that humans emigrated from their crowded, overpopulated systems to the New Eden star cluster through a wormhole. The wormhole disastrously collapsed, cutting the colonists off from Earth and leading to a die-back of civilization due to the worlds of New Eden (with a few small exceptions) relying entirely on Earth for imported food. Fast forward almost 20,000 years: Earth is all but a myth and some strange artifacts and the humans of New Eden have had to rediscover most advanced technology including spaceflight FTL travel.

It has long been tacitly understood that if a Gallente citizen wants functional cat ears and a tail, they can probably get them.

Game-Breaking Bug: An exploit with starbase reactors completely warped the Tech-II market when it was discovered the majority of an important compound was being produced via an exploit. After they fixed it, T2 prices shot up for a while.

From Apocrypha till Tyrannis 1.1 there was a bug that could give guns infinite range and accuracy in certain wormhole systems.

Gameplay and Story Integration: Things such as PC immortality, speed differences between gameplay and background story, etc. are described as publicly available technologies with the consequences being explored in depth.

A CCP-published short story even explains the player character's ability to customize their own avatar — as the new face being surgically removed from one of a group of slaves, numerous enough to give capsuleers an ample selection, who are then forced to wear a porcelain mask for the rest of their lives.

That said, CCP is not always speedy on the uptake. It took them nearly a week to notice that the Caldari had captured nearly all of the Gallente faction warfare systems (including a planet important to the storyline) and way longer for them to do anything about it.

Before incursions started, it was stated that all Sansha pirate ships were only the remains of a fleet over 100 years old. When incursions started and waves of Sansha's nation ships would invade a system, Sansha ships will still show up in incursion afflicted systems months after the incursion has past.

Gatling Good: Several guns in the game are gatling guns. The largest of which shoots 220mm shells at rapid fire rates. There are also Gatling Pulse Lasers and 75mm Gatling Railguns.

Amusingly, with the updated turret graphics from Inferno, the models for the aforementioned Railguns and Pulse Lasers are clearly NOT of a Gatling design, having only a single "barrel", for lack of a better term, and no rotary parts whatsoever.

Genetic Memory: The Intaki supposedly have this though it's not well fleshed out in the story - a religious practice called Rebirth transfers the personality of a dying person to a newborn. Nowadays it's done with technology, those who apparently do it without tech are called Idama; they train to recall past memories and are spiritual leaders.

Gimmick Level: Some Wormhole Systems apply bonuses to some ship stats, and penalties to others. Forcing some players to change up their usual fits for that particular system.

Glass Cannon: Destroyers are intended to be this against small ships; with a cruiser-sized hull and sensor signature, but only frigate-level defense slots, their effectiveness is... a bit situational. Blackbirds and Falcons are shield tanked ECM boats, which means they have to sacrifice most of their defensive shielding to maximize their electronic warfare capabilities. The Gallente Heavy Assault Ship Deimos is usually called "Diemost" because its impressive firepower, combined with average-at-best hit points, draws the attention of the entire enemy fleet. The ultimate example is the Stealth Bomber, a specialized frigate that fires anti-battleship torpedoes and area of effect bombs while having less resilience than a regular frigate.

Pre-Dominion(~2009) Titans are considered this, as they used to have less than 3 times the hit point buffer of a dreadnought, while costing up to 50 times more. In fact, most Titan pilots were mandated to plug in implants that drastically improves agility, turning Titans into FragileSpeedsters. Enter the battlefield, Deploy Doomsday, get out in 25 seconds. Rinse and repeat.

The Tier 3 battlecruisers introduced in the Crucible (2011) expansion have bonuses to allow mounting of battleship-class guns on ships with cruiser-level shielding and armor. The defenses are basically tinfoil, but a Tier 3 battlecruiser can match the firepower of the heaviest-gunned battleship of the same race (and in practice, will often exceed it, because a Tier 3 pilot will likely have fitted his ship to maximize firepower instead of worrying about shoring up his defenses).

The "Insta-Cane": a Hurricane-class battlecruiser fitted out with artillery cannons and as many Sensor Boosters, Damage mods and tracking enhancers as it can hold. The result is a ship that can achieve a lock in under a second, at the cost of having to tank what so ever. Very useful to pick off tacklers and Stealth Bombers as it can destroy most frigates in a single volley, but it will get torn apart if it tries to lock horns with anything that can survive a few hits.

Global Currency: ISK, amusingly its also the acronym for the currency of Iceland, where CCP is headquartered. Justified thusly: ISK is the currency of space, as agreed upon by the empires through CONCORD. Planets, and indeed countries on said planets, are all implied to have currency of their own; ISK was just created for space because the awesome amounts of normal currency that would be required otherwise. Anyone planetside can retire and live comfortably for the rest of their lives on a few ISKnote Don't try this with the real ISK, which is worth around half a U.S. cent.

One mission involves getting a bunch of cash to a certain group to ransom some prisoners. "Luckily they just want planetary currency, so the real ISK value is minimal." You're given an item to transfer to them; "A lot of money".

The Gallente are a liberal society that will preserve their democracy at all costs. Even if it involves the occasional lynch mob or campaign of ethnic repression.

The Caldari state fought a war of independence to protect their patriotic and meritocratic ideals from Gallente imperialism. And for the right to order their society into a collection of brutal corporate fiefdoms.

The Minmatar are a proud tribal civilization who broke free from Amarr slavery to found their own republic. A republic rife with corruption and a standard of living that only occasionally dips below the slavery they escaped.

The Amarr are the largest and most stable of all the empires, dedicated to justice and morality. Unfortunately (probably for you) their conception of justice and morality involves unabashed imperialism and a slave trade that is not only allowed by the government but blessed by the church, there being very little distinction between the two in Amarr.

Griefer: As you may have gathered from the rest of the article, this game is a griefer's paradise, and most of the player base loves it that way. As long as you don't use a hacked client or a known and classified exploit, any method you can find to unfairly kill players or steal their hard earned goods is allowed, including finding ways to subvert the anti-pvp measures in the beginning, "safe" areas.

Guide Dang It: the learning curve is isn't as steep as most make it out to be but since the game tells you so little, research on the players part is very important but... well...see the YMMV tab for more.

Hard-Coded Hostility: You can work for the human pirate faction if you're willing to brave the lawless space they make their bases in. Good luck trying to negotiate with the Rogue Drones or Sleepers, however.

High-Class Glass: Enforced Trope with the Royal Exchange monocle which costs $70 in real-life money. Player reaction has been overwhelmingly negative.

Hoist by His Own Petard: BoB when its overly serious attitude causes the alliance being disbanded by a disillusioned director and then Goonswarm itself when they forgot to pay their bills.

Holy Ground: The New Eden system, which is where the EVE Gate is located. Considered holy not merely within the NPC religion of the Amarrians, but actually by the players themselves to a small extent. It is quite common for players to make pilgrimages to the system, because of the mysticism surrounding the lore of the Gate. You can't actually reach the Gate in game, but it is common for players to place markers showing how far they traveled towards it. Also Subverted in that the system is actually lawless Low Sec space, and you can get killed by any old player milling about (though it's unlikely since the area is so backwater you'd be lucky to actually see another player).

Horde of Alien Locusts: Drones (little robot ships that assist capsuleers) fill this niche. They have a tendency to become fully sentient and escape to form hives that attempt to expand and assimilate any planets or stations they encounter. Even the player-controlled ones can have this effect; they are small and difficult to target, and a full flight can tear apart a large battleship while the owner stays safely out of range.

Hub Level: Jita, high-sec trading center in Caldari space. The other three empires have their own hubs but Jita trumps them by far. Unlike trading hubs in most games which feature a cluster of NPC shops, there's nothing special about Jita except its location (location location). It became a trading hub through players following economic pressure. Hell, Jita is even run on a separate server, to keep the universe from crashing completely if too many players enter Jita.

Human Resources: Played just straight in an old world event involving a scandal over the trade item and tasty treat "Protein Delicacies".

Deleted characters are killed and converted into biomass, according to flavor text in the character select menu.

Hyperspeed Escape: Know in game as "Warping Off". A significant portion of PVP is preventing it by scrambling the warp drive or deploying a bubble.

Hyperspace Lanes: Jump gates are used to travel between systems. In addition, Titans (large, capital-level ships) can create their own jump gates.

Inevitable Tournament: Twice a year CCP holds the Alliance Tournament. A series of matches pitting small teams from various player Alliances against each other, for cash prizes and unique ships. True to the spirit of EVE, it is plagued with player corruption. There are recorded incidents of ransoms being offered. A number of fights blatantly thrown, with one side activating their ship's self-destruct mechanisms or violating the rules. In the 8th Alliance Tournament, Hydra Reloaded negotiated said match throw while the match was still being fought(albeit victory for Hydra was all but academic at that point).

Note that Hydra Reloaded are well-known trolls, and their opponents claim that the deal never went through.

Hydra Reloaded did it again in the 9th tournament; in the finals, their opponents, Outbreak, had all but won, then threw the match. The fact that Outbreak and Hydra are essentially the same people may have something to do with it.

Inferred Holocaust: Once again, the single largest and bloodiest battle to date, the Battle of B-R5RB. Among countless smaller ships, 75 Titans, 13 supercarriers and 370 dreadnoughts were lost. Now, if one considers the fact that in-universe, even capsuleer-piloted ships do have crews (which was stated explicitly several times by CCP), it starts to get chilling. While no hard figures have ever been released, it is relatively common to assume in the EVE community that battleships have a crew of about 1000, dreadnoughts something about 5000, while supercarriers and titans might have a crew of about 10000 (which seems plausible if one considers the size of Titans, which is mostly over 10 kilometers). Multiply that with the amount of ships lost. That's right, in-universe, about three million people died in one single battle of a few hours.

Although the crew have life pods of their own to escape to, which may soften the blow, if one considers up to 60% of all the destroyed ships crew safely evacuated before the ships were destroyed it still adds up to over 1 million people lost. And that is only the best case scenario.

Although never given exact figures, there are said to be thousands to potentially hundreds of thousands of people on the Citadels that Capsuleers blast into space dust. Despite the heavy death toll associated with them colonists continue to flock to them.

Item Crafting: The entire basis of the game economy. Except for the part that is driven mainly by stuff blowing up.

A stated goal, one which they are well on the way to achieving, is to make everything in the game player created. With the exception of skill books, every ship, weapon, and item in game was created by someone.

It's All About Me: Quite common among capsuleers - but curiously, it's usually only those among the most successful and the least successful that tend to be this way.

Karma Houdini: Many players. Most MMOs will let you kill other player characters with no legal recompense, but how many explicitly say it's completely legal to scam other players, so long as you don't break their game rules in the process?

Karma Meter: Sec status theoretically gives a rough indication of how a character approaches the game, with a 5.0 character being a shining paragon of CONCORD's virtues and a -10 character being the bottom of the pirate scum barrel. It really tells you nothing about how a given player will act. A 5.0 character might suddenly turn on a juicy target of opportunity on a whim while an inveterate -10 might ignore a helpless hauler and find something bigger and better to blow up.

Most 0.0-based players have a flat 5.0 due to ratting there for cash or merely something to do. Most 0.0 players are also the ones who have extensive experience with blowing your stuff up.

Killer Rabbit: The Rorqual, the capital sized mining support ship for out of high sec, is seen by most players as just a indy ship. The Rorq is actually quite beefy and hits like a carrier when it does fight however, so anyone trying to kill a properly fitted rorqual better bring a good sized fleet and/or a capital if they hope for any success. ESPECIALLY if said Rorqual has back up, which it can use it's insane bonuses to capital sheild repairs to make sure you can't kill its friends.

TEST loves useing Rorquals to fight for the sheer lulz potential of killing hordes of people with one, doing things like hot dropping them into fleet battles, makeing everyone do a double take as a mining ship tears through their fleet.

The Caldari take it literally, with many of their ships providing bonuses to Kinetic damage.

Law Enforcement, Inc.: Each Caldari megacorp operates its own private police force or paramilitary, while the Federation has hired Roden Shipyards' extensive fleet to assist in border patrols. ("Coincidentally", the current President is Jacus Roden, founder of Roden Shipyards.)

Leave No Survivors: Most NPC pirates will show mercy (or more probably apathy) towards your escape pod, but standard protocol for capsuleers who will even go as far as scrubbing their own team's wrecks and pods to keep them away from the enemy. sociopathic heroes indeed.

In Empire Space, pods slip into warp almost instantly. Getting a lock on a pod before it warps is extremely difficult (unless the pilot is AFK), so pod kills are fairly rare in space that doesn't allow bubbles.

Level Grinding: Averted with a bite back; skills level via real time, and it does not give a damn what you're doing during that time. They'll even level while you're offline. However, getting the money to pay for your ships, upgrades, and whatnot all require some manner of grinding.

There is status grinding. In order to be allowed to run higher level missions for an NPC corp, they have to like you enough. In order to do that, you usually have to run many low paying missions first. Several perks, such as being able to create jump clones at certain stations, also depend on high status, so players often will have to go through this many times.

Lost Technology: The story of scientific progress in New Eden is dominated by discovering and relearning Lost Technology, from jump gates to Tech 2 and Tech 3 gear to Jamyl's mystery superweapon. Players with the Archeology skill and tools can recover artifacts and databanks which can be used in building T2 and T3 stuff.

Not to mention the one and only superbly kickass Federate Issue Megathron. What Entity gets, Entity keeps.

Love Ruins the Realm: In the Metagame, no less. The Tribute War and the collapse of the NCDot alliance partly happened because of an internet romance between one of the NCDot CEOs and the CEO of the pirate corporation Black Legion; this dragged NCDot into a war that only half of their members wanted, and NCDot broke apart due to a friendly-fire incident between a Black Legion vessel and a vessel that was owned by the industrialist wing of NCDot.

Massive Multiplayer Scam: One of the few examples in a Massive Multiplayer Online Game. The player group called Guiding Hand Social Club infiltrated a corporation, worked their way up the ranks before emptying the corp's wallet, stealing their assets and killing it's leader once.

Master of None: In some player's opinion, Gallente. Specifically, their fighting style requires lots of power intensive equipment that their ships just don't have power for. Add to the fact that their guns have shoddy accuracy compared to most other races and you have subpar competition.

A few of their ships are the most favored out of their respective classes, like Thantos, Moros, and Nyx. special mention however goes to the Catalyst, whose dirt cheap price tag and ability to deal massive amounts of damage quickly make it ideal for "suicide ganking" ships in high and low sec. Because of this and its surprising effectiveness in PvP (where destroyers normally don't well)make it one of the most feared ships in the game.

Mega Corp.: All the space-dwelling NPC corporations in the game are megacorps, occupying varying levels on the scale of "shady" and "not shady" and wielding significant influence. The Caldari megacorps are the state.

Metagame: EVE Online's metagame is a vast and terrifying entity, with entire pieces of software written to allow simple tasks to be accomplished properly. Quite a few players, particularly those in 0.0 space, state that they hate the actual game, but the Metagame is fantastic.

Mighty Glacier: The Amarr — They'd melt you out of the skies... if you couldn't run from them.

Alts. You could in theory be chatting to three or four separate people at one time, only they're all the same person and you have no way of knowing it! This is also sometimes used in scams - posting with alts to make it look like there's far more support for your "investment opportunity" than there really is.

Money Spider: Killing pirate NPCs will net you the bounties placed on them.

The Rifter, a frigate around the size of a medium/large aircraft, normally fits 3 pairs of 200mm autocannons.

A lesser example would be Gallente ships configured for blasters; short range, high dammage guns. A Thorax cruiser can peak around 700 damage per second, a pack of them flown by the Star Fraction alliance is fameous for taking out a Band of Brothers tournament fleet setup they boasted was unbeatable. And God help you if you land in blaster range of a Megathron battleship.

The Moros, the Gallente Dreadnought, takes this to it's logical conclusion: with 3 "XL" Blasters, Tech 2 Sentry Drones (effectively portable turrets), and maxed out skills, they can do over 7000 DPS, which is more damage than anything else in the game by a very, very long shot. The downside? They're so unwieldy and turn so slowly that it has a hard time hitting anything smaller and faster than itself.

Of course, the mere existence of a 6-barreled, 2500mm autocannon kind of proves this point.note 2500mm is over eight feet. The tallest players in basketball could stand upright inside ONE of those barrels.

Mundane Utility: In Eve, the God-Emperor of this trope is Chribba and his fleet of mining-fit supercapitals, including four Titans. This would normally invite mockery and mass-ganking from the entire player-base, if not for Chribba being so universally beloved.

Carriers and super carriers get used for this quite a lot, to the point they are often called the Swiss army knives of eve. When not in combat they are often used for hauling (especially assembled ships and drones) and can even be seen helping out with mining ops.

Some player pun names adopted from technical glitches; (Node Crash), which was inspired by yet another character named Server Lag, and is first cousin to the character Jump Queue... all things EVE's players fear. Node Crash's player has noted that they inevitably die first in combat against other players, perhaps because of fear she'll invoke her name.

One of the Supercarriers (formerly Motherships) had this in its description: "Imagine thousands of Hornets pouring out of the Devil's mouth. Now imagine they have Autocannons." This may also just be a reference to the Hornet Light Drones.

Republic University School. Their level of sanity is below standard, to the point where a guy has, on a couple of occasions started a campaign against CONCORD... And even recruited newbies for support.

"There was this explosion, and I'm in a small, egg-shaped ship now. Did I level up?"

Negative Space Wedgie: The EVE Gate, for starters. Not to mention the newest addition — hundreds of unstable wormholes to uncharted space that appeared following a galaxy-wide Earth-Shattering Kaboom. The systems that said wormholes lead to tend to have various physics-altering anomalies, as well.

Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: The Minmatar's "Elder Fleet" attack on the Amarr Empire wound up doing this. They arguably lost more in personnel than they freed in slaves, they gave Jamyl Sarum the perfect moment to make her "miraculous" entrance and become Empress of the leaderless-for-years Amarr Empire, and the Defiants, a band of well-led and well-armed Minmatar pirates who were long a thorn in the Amarr's side, were destroyed to a man holding off the Imperial Navy long enough for the Elder Fleet to escape. Ultimately, the attack wound up helping the Amarr a lot more than it hurt them.

No-One Could Survive That: CONCORD Police ships are so powerful that CCP has specifically stated that they consider surviving an attack from them to be an unacceptable violation of the game's mechanics.

While it's actually possible to evade Concord somewhat reliably if you know what you're doing, it requires an extremely specific setup that is useless for doing anything you would get Concordokkened for in the first place, meaning it's largely done on the test server for bragging rights.

Only Mostly Dead: Players who die have their consciousness instantly transferred into a clone body. Technically, the person doesn't even die. When the capsule detects a hull breach in the pod, a probe injects itself into the capsuleer, scans the capsuleer's brain, and transmits the information almost instantly. All they've done, really, is swap bodies before the body in the capsule dies.

Our Elves Are Better: Jovians are a secluded human-esque race who have such an amazing understanding of technology that they have found a way to live forever (without cloning!) but have one weakness: depression... sound like Tolkien Elves to anyone else? Just rewrite it a bit to be magic and forests rather than space ships and sectors of... space.

Palette Swap: The pirate ships, with the notable exception of the Angels and the Sansha, are just the bog standard ships that players fly with different colour schemes. Tech 2 and faction variants are similar, although this is a bit more justified.

Most T2 ships usually have bits added on somewhere to varying degrees.

Perpetual Motion Machine: Played straight in the Industrial Career tutorial, which has you build one. And averted in the flavour text for the Skill Thermodynamics:

"Also gives you the ability to frown in annoyance whenever you hear someone mention a perpetual motion unit."

Perpetually Static: Nothing changes in High-sec space. In 0.0, player run empires can rise, deploy stations and collapse through player activity.

As the game has continued, the dev's inclination to emphasise ship combat to the exclusion of all else has also become obvious to the extent that some have nicknamed the game "Counter-Strike In Space". Never mind that Eve is not a twitch shooter...

Point Defenseless: Defender missiles need multiple hits to kill torpedoes, must be manually fired, cannot intercept missiles fired at friendly ships, and can easily be overwhelmed by multiple missile-spamming opponents.

The solution: Smartbombs, which aren't very smart as they hit everything within a certain radius with damage. Including incoming missiles, though, so fleet combat often involves "firewalls" of interlocking smartbombing ships, being repaired by logistics ships to keep the firewall going despite the fact they're hitting their neighbors.

Police Are Useless: CONCORD's protection is very... idiosyncratic by real-world standards. They will not intervene for theft, but will warp in and vaporize you for even a single accidental shot at another ship. It is possible for a thief to trick you into being blown up and make off with your stuff right in front of the police ships. Justified in-universe as CONCORD has given up on trying to parse the morality of capsuleers, and basically considers incidents between them to be Evil Versus Evil. They settle for a strict letter-of-the-law approach to maintain some approximation of order. The Odyssey expansion made it somewhat more realistic by flagging thieves as legally killable by anyone with no repercussions.

Powered by a Forsaken Child: It is quite possible that clones of capsuleers might not contain their original consciousness, but it's implied that most people who use cloning don't care anyway. In-Universe beliefs about this vary. The Amarr believe that the soul does not make the transfer and that clones are an abomination, if a necessary one — families of the nobility are forbidden from cloning (Jamyl Sarum's "miraculous return" to save Amarr after her ritual suicide in the Succession Trials has to be danced around very carefully). The Intaki (a sub-culture of the Gallente) dabbled in consciousness transfer for centuries as part of their religious beliefs (think Reincarnation of a sort); their scientists made many of the advances in cloning tech, including Jump Clones. And so on.

The Power of Trust: In a game where any member of your corporation can kill and/or rob you without police intervention, trust ends up being one of the most important assets a corporation can possess. EVE Online is rather famous for cases of said trust being magnificently broken.

Chribba. A man who somehow managed to be trusted by the majority of EVE - trusted enough, in fact, to handle multi-hundred-billion ISK transfers and ship trades. His third-party transfer service is well-known and loved throughout all corners of EVE and has built him a reputation as "The Only Honest Man in EVE". At one point, grateful members of an alliance gave him a star system. And to top it off, he mines veldspar in a dreadnought. In hi-sec.

Red Frog Freight. In a game where letting anyone else touch your stuff in any way whatsoever is normally considered the height of stupidity, Red Frog is trusted to ship player goods all over the game. The very few times they have been robbed or double-crossed they have received almost universal sympathy rather than the usual pointing and laughing.

Precursors: The humans that settled New Eden via the Eve gate before it collapsed. These may or may not have included (sources are hazy) the four lost civilizations whose artifacts are spread around space: the Yang Jung, the Takmahl, the Talocan and the Sleepers. We don't know what happened to the first two, but the Sleepers and the Talocan somehow got to wormhole space, populated it, and whatever remains puts a hurting on explorers who venture near (see Demonic Spiders). This hints around the cataclysm that heralded the (re)discovery of wormholes makes you wonder if they planned it.

The Jove survived the destruction of the Eve Gate best, and though they still exist, little has been heard from them in a long time. As a species they're threatened by a genetic disease that could wipe them out and last known, they were on the decline.

Privately Owned Society: In a way, since literally every single organization of any kind is a corporation, from player guilds, to branches of governments, to charities, to universities, to pirate bands, to terrorists, to zombie cults... everything is a corp. No exceptions.

Private Military Contractors: Many player corps and some entire alliances advertise themselves as mercs for hire. Often it boils down to slightly more targeted piracy with cash paid up front, but the better mercs get it done professionally.

Promotional Powerless Piece of Garbage: The Interbus Shuttle. It came with the boxed set of Eve and a new account must be created in order to get it. It is a Gallente Shuttle with a Palette Swap and double the cargo capacity. Meaning it has zero offensive ability, extremely limited defensive abilities and 1/10 of the cargo capacity of a frigate.

Most anniversery and christmas gifts fall under this catagory as well. The Apothesis is a shuttle with a cool new model and the Zephyr will not be targeted by Sleeper drones, but is poor in every other respect and can only fit what amounts to be a core probe launcher.

Past Christmas gifts included Snowball Launchers as a fun but useless-for-killing weapon, and the snowballs all melted shortly anyway. Nigh useless now, they and the melted snowballs sell for millions on contracts.

Psycho for Hire: The majority of "mercenary" corps fall under this heading. Many of them are thinly disguised pirates who use the unprovable excuse of being paid to wardec your corp, and most of the rest are thinly disguised pirates who actually are being paid to wardec your corp.

Punch Clock Villain: The empires' attitude towards low and null security space vacillates between military oppression and withering apathy, and unsurprisingly many citizens in these areas decide to join pirate corporations to escape their worlds half empty. It can get so bad that in one instance citizens literally signed over their solar system to the local pirates. This raises some troubling implications about the actions of capsuleers, with only a few beleaguered voices such as the Servant Sisters of Eve calling them out on their sociopathic "heroics".

This is largely limited to the Angel Cartel (referenced above) and the Guristas Pirates. The other major pirate factions are portrayed in a much more consistently negative light.

Purely Aesthetic Gender: The ability to pilot your ship is determined exclusively by your mental capacity. Even the Race and Faction you choose during character creation only determines where you start. Anyone can use any item or ship in the game, or fight for any side, once they get the right skills.

Quicksand Box: The sheer number of options, career paths and play styles can be overwhelming. There is no limit and hence no guidance to what a player should do next.

Some learn this the hardway, if they let themselves get tricked into attacking CONCORD along with a certain non-CONCORD-friendly guy.

Ramming Always Works: You can change the direction and velocity of an opponent's ship by applying sufficient ramming force. This enables the use of "bumping" as a combat tactic, where you ram your target in order to keep them out of range of the stargate or station docking ring (and thus prevent escape).

Bumping is also used to prevent enemies from being able to align to warp. Combined with heavy energy neutralization, bumping was the only effective way to kill capital ships (especially motherships, which could not be warp-scrambled) in low-security space before the introduction of heavy interdictors.

God help you if your station's shields have been sabotaged though (a fact only alluded to in The Novel). See Dropped a Bridge Mothership On Him, above. Does not apply on a ship whose shields have been depleted however.

Randomly Drops: Faction and officer gear. The Salvaged Material is also determined the moment the wreck appears. And it's random (though certain enemies have higher chances of dropping certain types of salvage loot (Angels, EOM, Amarr, Blood Raiders all have high chances of giving Armor Plates, Serpentis and Gallente both have a decent chance of giving interfaces)

Rat Stomp: IN SPACE!!!!111!!1 In Eve lingo, NPC piRATes are "rats" and the act of hunting them in asteroid belts "ratting". While technicaly optional, it is part of the tutorials, and most PVE combat missions have some variation on it.

Reading the Enemy's Mail: There are several instances of real-world hacking on player alliance forums. Spies are also assumed to be nearly universal, to the point where many major alliance leaders freely admit to lying flagrantly and constantly to their own membership to stymie spying efforts.

Reality-Breaking Paradox: You can't do it, but there is apparently a method involving the local Bags of Holding. "You cannot place a Planck generator container within another Planck generator, as it will cause a graviton harmonics chain reaction whose end cannot be determined."

Recycled In Space: Sansha's Nation are Zombies in Space. The Amarr are Space Catholics. The Gallente are the only democracy out of the four empires (although the Jovian government isn't known). The Caldari are Space Megacorps. The Minmatar, between the immigration they're sending to the Gallente and their battles with drug cartels, are Space Mexicans.

The Gallente race are originally French, but the Federation contains multiple races, including some Minmatar immigrants in the fluff, although you can't create a Gallente character from one of the Minmatar races. The Gallente Federation is very similar to America in many ways (see the Eagle Land entry)

The original settlers of Gallente Prime were at least a degree or two removed from France itself, having lived in Tau Ceti before migrating to New Eden. As well, the sect that the Amarr descend from are heavily implied to have been excommunicated by that era's "Unified Catholic Church."

Refining Resources: Let's say that Planetary Interaction, a bare facet of the whole process, got five tiers of resources, about 120 total, each with it's multiple-resource schematic. and it's considered simple.

The Sani Sabik, an heretical, blood-obsessed splinter group of the Amarr faith. While some sects are fairly innocuousnote as far as cults go, anyway, the Blood Raiders are... rather unpleasant.

The Amarr religion itself a more debatable example. On the one hand, it does have a basic system of morality common to most religions. On the other hand, it condones slavery and forced conversions.

Religious and Mythological Theme Naming: Amarr ships named after various religious/mythological concepts, some Caldari ships named after mythological creatures (e.g. Tengu, Kitsune, Phoenix, Chimera), plus a few Minmatar ships named after parts of Norse mythology (Ragnarok, Loki, Sleipnir, Hel, Valkyrie), Gallente tend toward Greek and deities with a sprinkling of Sumerian (Ares, Ishkur, Nyx...). Minmatar also have the Wolf assault ship, said in the description to be named after 'a mythical beast renowned for its voraciousness'

The T20 scandal, when a CCP dev was caught giving rare T2 Blueprints to his alliance, Band of Brothers. This fueled a lot of the hate that they would get later on. Also resulted in the creation of the Council Of Stellar Management, a player-elected oversight council.

Scenery Porn: The Dominion expansion brought a revamp to the planet models that lands them firmly in this category, in combination with other graphics updates over the last coupple years.

The University of Caille — the largest university in the cluster — has a grand total of less than half a million students. That puts it on par with City University of New York.

Of course one has to wonder where all the mass for the stargates are coming from since each gate weighs 5 orders of magnitude more than the Sunnote the sun's mass is about 2*1030 kg while a stargate's mass is 1035 kg..

Combined with the fact each gate (volume of 10,000 km3) has a volume 1.4 trillion times smaller than the (volume of 1,400,000,000,000,000,000 km3) and you wonder how they don't collapse into a black holenote when calculated out stargates are denser than black holes..

The reason for this is that mass is a key determining factor in lots of thing, most notably how things interact when they bump into each other, even things that are held still like stations the things that bounce of them are (or were) effected by mass. While almost everything in space can be bumped/rammed, planetary bodies, stars etc cannot be. Soooo they gave all of the big things in space that they didn't want anyone to ever be able to move and gave them impossibly vast mass values, while planets and stars have realistic(ish) values. Chances are the guys putting in mass values for different things never spoke to each other.

It is even more egregious with ship dimensions and cargo capacity. An example: A deep space cargo vessel, explicitly designed and built for shipping, might be about 700 meters long - 715 m in the case of a particular tech II Caldari transport, to be precise, and, judging by the scale, somewhere between 80 and 130 meters high and wide, respectively. That same Caldari vessel has a cargo capacity of 5500 m3. This is explicitly given in the ship info. Now, the cubic root of 5500 is...slightly over 17.5. That's right, the cargo hold of a ship which is over 700 meters long apparently is, if a cubic shape of said hold is assumed, about 17.5 meters long, high and wide...on a ship specifically designed for transport of goods across interstellar distances, with all the energy needs that implies, which thus should require an extremely high ratio of mass transported versus energy expended in order to be profitable. That's not a slip-up anymore, it's mind-bogglingly inane.

You can eject cargo into a "jet can," a small barrel like structure that can hold a staggering 27,000 m3 by default. Any ship has an infinite number of these things on boardnote there is however a two minute cool down in deploying them, but for some reason most hauling ships can't even reach a fifth of that capacity in their cargo holds. Even if every ship assembles the jet can before loading it and jettisoning it into space, that still means ships have 27,000 m3 of space it could be using as storage but instead spent on shooting comparatively small amounts of cargo into space.

Second Place Is for Winners: Invoked like crazy in the game's politics. If a corp or alliance's membership perceives they are losing a war, the largest portion will flee in droves, and often try to join the enemy. So it is standard practice for leadership to construe what objectively appears to be a loss as having achieved some secret agenda. In a handful of cases, this has turned out to actually be truth.

Secret Police: When the Empyrian War started, the Gallente got their version of this called "The Black Eagles", because the Caldari invasion was partly enabled by an admiral who sold them information. Later, they tried to enforce an attempted nationalization of several Gallente megacorps...and Jacus Roden, founder of Roden Shipyards, backed by the other corps, successfully faced them down. He became the new President soon after.

Also applies to the Providence Directorate, or Provists (essentially Tibus Heth's gang of enforcers) until they were deposed by the megacorps in the aftermath of the Battle of Caldari Prime.

Serious Business: On rare occasions, players have spent more on this game than they would on Ferraris. People try to win battles by getting the power cut to their enemies' alliances' computers... in real life.

Corp/Alliance forums and TS/vent servers are attacked or compromised to prevent their use or to gain information.

Some players have 6 or 7 accounts... or more...

Spending large amounts of money on ingame money or items is rare though, since CCP bans anyone caught doing it, with the exception of selling game time codes, which works out as EXTREMELY expensive.... Buying enough codes for a titan or mothership plus fitting would cost thousands of dollars. People have done it though. Large purchases of ISK, particularly when combined with buying a character, are often followed by losing an extremely badly fit capital ship or other expensive ship due to having no idea how to fly it, followed by being laughed at on the forums.

Plus, if you haven't noticed from the intro text, the game has its own goddamned governmental body to provide real-world democratic oversight. Have you ever seen this in any other game!?

In the system of Dead End (two jumps away from the EVE Gate), orbiting the fifth moon of the fifth planet, is a massive black monolith. The description reads "It's full of stars."

The description of the Caldari Naga mentions that, before it entered production, the ship appeared in the popular Police ProceduralCPF Blue.

The Shill: Sock Puppet accounts for the purposes of scamming are perfectly legal. Dedicated scammers can have dozens of active accounts with spotless histories to act as "satisfied customers" or worm their way into a corporation for that perfect theft. The spoils of a really big scam or heist can buy years of game time off the in-game market, so it doesn't even have to cost them any Real Life money.

Shoot the Medic First: Logistics ships and their Tech 2 variants are the medics of space ships. They can repair armor and boost the shield of other ships. Of course, they're always the ones who get popped first by an enemy fleet.

Sociopathic Hero: Most of the players are, indeed, sociopathic heroes. Yes, the players, not the player characters. If you aren't prepared to deal with someone who you grew to know as a close friend over months or even years turning out to have been lying the whole time in an effort to get in position to rob you of every last isk you accumulated in the game, you shouldn't play EVE. If you are that someone, congratulations: you're playing as intended. Behavior is encouraged by the developers that could get you jail time in any other context.

Sorting Algorithm of Evil: More dangerous enemies will only usually appear in lower-security space, but it's possible to get at them right from the start of the game if you so desire. The reason for this is that it becomes impossible for more notorious criminals (and that includes players) to enter high-security space

Sorting Algorithm of Weapon Effectiveness: Averted. Depending on the way the market is set out, it is usually possible to buy some of the best weaponry in the game from the station you start in - although it is highly unlikely you'll be able to use/afford it immediately.

Space Fighter: Fighters can be launched by Carriers and Motherships. Unlike other ships, they're too small to fit the capsule system and thus cannot be controlled by players. Instead they are controlled by AI, much like drones.

Controlled by AI only as far as game mechanics go, anyway. If you zoom in on an individual fighter, you can clearly see a cockpit with a humanoid figure inside◊. Carrier-based fighters are the only "manned" drones in the game.

Space Friction: Some message boards have speculated that EVE space has the viscosity of WD-40. Word of God says the in-game physics engine is actually based more on fluid dynamics than real zero-g physics.

The in-universe explanation is that warp drives cause an effect similar to friction. A ship without one could reach any sublight speed with enough acceleration. Oh, and you can't turn them off once they've been turned on, because they explode. This in turn is the Hand Wave for ships suffering Critical Existence Failure in combat.

Space Is an Ocean: All of the race navies use nautical rank names, space has plenty of friction, copious amounts of nebula in deadspace complexes, and many ships have visible bridges, decks, et cetera. The Caldari Corax◊ takes the ocean theme to the next level, as it's pretty much a Space U-Boat◊ injected with the typical Caldari design choices.

Space Is Cold: Destroying a player's capsule yields the player's Frozen Corpse. Some people collect corpses as trophies. Partially justified in most cases, as most activity takes place many astronomical units from the system's star, where corpses really would freeze if given time. However, being blown up tends to cause instant flash-freezing rather than the hours of cooling suggested by thermodynamics.

And, of course, some people even sell corpses to the highest bidder, should the corpse be of a very notorious person such as a major Alliance CEO.

Space Is Noisy: Because the sound is actually just the ship simulating the noises that events might make if they were audible. This is supposedly done to prevent a capsuleer from going insane. Since every capsuleer is a mass murderer, well...

To quote the old meme: "EVE has sound?". (Meaning, many players play with the sound off either to save computer cycles or to not interfere with voice coms.)

Players sometimes comment on why the pod would simulate the sound of wind. The pod is of Jovian design, but the first ones given to mainstream humans were built with the Caldari, whose ancestors worshipped the winds.

Also of note, the 'wind' is actually the most real of the sounds to be heard in EVE, bar UI clicks and beeps. It's been described, in a few places, as the solar wind; 'could even be the pod's converting it to audio and streaming it from external sensors.

Wormholes. Select to look at them and not only do all of them hum constantly, but some of them even transmit the (simulated) radio chatter from the systems they connect to, creating a constant unrecognizeable babbling of several different voices and sounds. There are stories of people who're convinced of beeing able to understand fragments, thinking those holes talk to them if their wormhole observation shift was just slightly too long. Something that is easily to dismiss and laugh at, until you realize on one of your own shifts, that other wormholes create a sound that is disturbingly similar to a slightly agitated, deep breathing.

Space Pirates: Every. Single. Character. Even CONCORD counts, since they hire criminals—i.e., the PCs—to do their dirty work.

Spaceship Girl: Aura, the main computer AI which is, apparently, shared by every capsuleer ever, who provides tutorials and help options, as well as vocally informs the pilot of just about everything. A Chronicle tells the story of her history.

Space Trucker: You can become one, hauling other players' goods around can be very lucrative. Red Frog Freight is particularly well-known.

Special Effect Branding: The Amarr have sleek, symmetrical, shiny golden ships with beam weapons. The Gallente have smooth-shaped, almost organic-looking green ships with Attack Drones and blasters. The Caldari have utilitarian, gunmetal grey/blue, angular ships with railguns and missiles. The Minmatar have rust-brown/red heaps'o'junk which fly at unsafe speeds and the larger ships fire car-sized artillery shells. Some of the minor factions also have their own designs. Angel Cartel fly ships that resemble the Shivans mentioned above, the Sansha ships look like they have been designed by a sadomasochist, the rogue drones are basically mechanical insects and the Jove fly Gigeresque biomechanical ships.

Status Quo Is God: No matter how many times you run a mission or kill NPCs, the enemy never seems to run out of ships, men or equipment. In four years, despite constantly being stated to be on the brink of war, almost nothing of note has happened to the four Empires.

Finally averted with Retribution's Battle for Caldari Prime were Gallente and Caldari forces engaged each other with Capsuleer assistance in the Luminaire system. Many see this as a prelude to a larger war between the Gallente and Caldari of which their respective allies might be pulled into.

On the other hand, 0.0 space is outside of the four Empires' control and left entirely for the players to shape. Changes in Alliance's member corporations, Coalitions between different alliances, and the regions controlled by different alliances occur constantly; some alliances might be completely destroyed and replaced by others. See the collapse of the Triumvirate, the disbanding of Band of Brothers, and Goonswarm moving in its entirety to the BoB's former space for the more prominent examples.

Suspiciously Specific Denial: Yes, the enemies you fight in the Gallente mission 'Exploited Sensitivities' are unidentified mercenaries who are in no way affiliated with the Caldari Navy. The fact that they fly Caldari Navy ships in Caldari Navy colours that drop Caldari Navy loot is totally coincidental. Move along, citizen.

There Is No Kill Like Overkill: The usual result when a day old n00b blunders into a 50+ man 0.0 gate camp. Also seen in roaming gangs, where one man tackles a defenseless mining ship, and waits patiently so the entire gang can get in on the kill.

Not to mention any time someone pisses off CONCORD (the NPC police force in high-security space). They have a response time measuring in seconds, and weapons far more powerful than anything available to players — so powerful, in fact, that actually managing to escape CONCORD's wrath after invoking it is considered by CCP to be an exploit and can get your account banned.

Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: The Jovians were a spacefaring nation when the eve gate collapsed, and were far enough away that none of their technology was destroyed by the ensuing shockwave, which makes them far more developed than any of the other races. They've spent most of that time perfecting their cloning and evilutionary biology in order to drive out their base instincts and other undesirable traits. They even have an "Academy of Aggressive Behavior" which teaches people how to act aggressively in spite of their genetic conditioning so that they can preserve that option just in case it's ever needed. However, somewhere something went wrong and they ended up introducing the "Jovian Disease" into the gene pool. The Jovian disease causes its victim to fall into an incurable depression which invariably leads to suicide.

Too Awesome to Use: Every so often, CCP hosts contests with unique ships as prizes. While these are usually either just palette swaps of normal ships or have minor improvements at best, if you win one, you do not ever, ever attempt to fly it until you are ready to lose it. The second you undock with one, every single player in the game will attempt to murder you simply so that they can brag that they blew up an irreplaceable ship.

To the Pain: The Amarr and GallenteMethods of Torture chronicles make use of the second and first variant, respectively.

Tragic Villain: In the fiction, Idonis Ardishapur. Rare among Amarr of his era, he saw great things for the Minmatar people, generally treated them better than everyone else, and was even involved in a secret romantic relationship with one whom he truly loved. Then they killed his father, the Royal Heir, putting him into that position with all the demands and responsibilities thereof, including the responsibility to punish this murder and act of rebellion. Severely. So with great reluctance, he ordered his House's fleet to evacuate all Amarrians from the planet, then glass the entire planet and kill everything on it, nearly completing genocide against the Starkmanir Tribe in the process. What's left of the planet has since become a safe-haven for Minmatar exiled from their own society, and a law Idonis secretly enacted keeps the Amarr from screwing with them.

Unobtanium: Asteroid mined ore refines in to exotic sounding materials such as Zydrine, Tritanium and many others that make the advanced technology of EVE possible, some are more rarer than others. However the clearest example of unobtainium is the main ingredient of the incredibly advanced Tech 3 ships - nanofullerenes and fullerites, found only in wormhole space, and mostly salvaged from wrecks of Sleeper drones. It is more rarer than anything else found on New Eden, but for their incredible technological properties in constant demand.

One of the most common types of PvP engagement involves the target, bait, and overwhelming force. Bait the target with something juicy, let it choose whether to engage or not, and if the target engages, crush the target with inescapable force. Often the target can perceive the trap and choose to disengage (or not to respond, if the target is in high security space), just as Sulu did.

Of course, the target that takes the bait can also be a bait that pretends to take the bait, summons an overwhelming force (often a super carrier nowadays) with a cyno to turn that opposing force into a target. That target-turned-force can also turn out to be a bait... with less than a couple more iterations a baiting attempt can escalate into a full blown fleet battle sporting several capital/super capital ships.

Every player has to eventually face the situation of losing one's prized property(be it ISK, a ship, a cargo full of an industrial, a well constructed POS full of valuables, or a capital/super capital ship, etc) and come to terms, by either leaving the game altogether or accepting the loss and moving on. It is almost as close as one can get to facing death in an MMORPG, and it is part of a capsuleer's cycle of life. This kind of loss effectively fuels Eve's thriving market economy, as everyone is busy replacing the spontaneous loss of ships and modules during PvP situations, and stockpiling to prepare for future losses.

To facilitate players to cope with the eventual losses, the advanced combat tutorial has incorporated a literal Kobayashi Maru test in one part. It orders the player to blow up a pirate frigate, and suddenly summons dozens of cruisers fitted with sensor dampeners/webs that will obliterate all but the most agile and reflexive pilots. A similar type of test exist in the level 1 epic mission arc, which is usually the first time a new player faces real warp jamming and the panic of their trusty warp drive not responding. No wonder beginner systems and Arnon (the hub system for the newbie epic arc) are always lit up like Christmas trees at the star map when showing "ships destroyed" statistics.

Used Future: The Minmatar, massively Many of their ship designs look so haphazard that they are often joked as being held together by duct tape, or called "flying junk-heaps" by those who mock them (One notable EVE machinima once referred to the titular Minmatar ship as "an explosion in a girder factory"). Those who like them declare "In Rust We Trust" and "never underestimate the power of Tech 2 duct tape". Some of the newer Minmatar ships have moved away from the more haphazard 'held together with duct tape' style of other ones (such as the Hurricane battlecruiser, the Maelstrom battleship, the Loki strategic cruiser and all the capital ships, which have a very definite style).

In the backstory, the Minmatar were once very technologically savvy (but didn't develop interstellar drives) and the enslavement by the Amarr hindered their advancement considerably. When the Minmatar rebellion came around, they had to use what they had, so early Minmatar ships are not suited for prolonged warfare and battles of the line, relying on hit and run tactics and overwhelming numbers. In the current time, the Sebiestor and Thukker tribes foster some of the best engineers in the cluster; Development of the Jump Freighters are credited to the Thukker, for example.

Vendor Trash: Prior to changes introduced in Tyrannis, the Trade Goods category was only useful to players as mission objectives, POS fuel, and outpost construction components.

Rogue Drone alloys were considered Reprocessing Plant Trash. Dropped low-grade ship modules are also frequently shunted to the reprocessing plant. However reprocessing yields minerals which are the backbone of manufacturing, so minerals always sell well.

On the other hand, an item which is literally called, displayed and described as garbage, is a vital component in the player based and pretty obscure creation of booster drugs.

Victory Is Boring: Periodically, nullsec will stabilize, with one of the major power-blocs winning a war and controlling the largest portion of it, or just managing to reach detente with each other. Unfortunately, most null-sec pilots are there for shooting things in the first place. Stagnation inevitably sets in, and boredom becomes a major problem for most of their soldiers. Keeping them from leaving or picking fights with each other can become a major headache. Fortunately, peace in Eve never lasts.

Wake-Up Call Boss: Dagan in the Sisters Of EVE epic arc, the first storyline unlocked by new players. Unlike basically every enemy up to that point, Dagan flies a Cruiser, and relies on capacitor-draining abilities that limit one's ability to tank his fire. His lasers are very accurate, long ranged, and deal 100+ damage per shot while firing fairly quickly. Players are recommended to upgrade to a Cruiser for the mission (as Frigates can't out-DPS his shield regeneration, and Destroyers are too slow to avoid his fire) or to recruit some help from other players in the system.

War Memorial: CCP dedicated a memorial called "Titanomachy" for the 75 Titans and 4200+ other ships destroyed at the Battle of B-R5RB.

Warp Whistle: 0.0 alliances can deploy Jump Bridges. which allow for instant travel between systems that would otherwise take several jumps to reach.

We ARE Struggling Together: Most often, a war in this game ends when an alliance melts down from a combination of external pressure and internal drama. Even one of the strongest alliances in the game, Goonswarm, has fallen victim to internal politics, going through at least one cycle of disbanding and reforming.

We Buy Anything: You can find players willing to buy almost anything. Many low end modules are bought solely for mineral value when reprocessed. The reprocessing plant itself will reprocess just about any ship/module and give you the minerals in return for taking a percentage unless you have good enough standing with the station owners. they will reprocess anything except non-metallic items really.

We Will Spend Credits in the Future: The currency, known as ISK (Inter-Stellar Kreditsnote which just happens to be the currency code for the Icelandic króna), is not so much a global currency as it is a global exchange currency. Planetary economies and sometimes individual planetary nations almost all have their own currencies, ISK was merely setup as an exchange medium to manage the obscene amounts of money being used at the inter-stellar level - the popular saying goes you can retire comfortably planet-side basically anywhere in the cluster on single digit amounts of the stuff* The realities of the economy make this highly suspect — a single machine gun bullet made of ordinary lead (albeit one designed and built for ship-to-ship space combat) normally costs several ISK. And despite that, the economy is such that the de-facto unit of currency is in millions of isk. Ask someone for a price, and they say '50', they mean 50 MILLION isk. Guess the Casual Interstellar Travel isn't all that casual...

Weapon of Mass Destruction: Titan-class motherships can fit a Doomsday Device; each of the four major races in the game have slightly different ones but they all operate on the principle of the Earth-Shattering Kaboom (or nearly so). Most commonly deployed against large fleets, especially in PvP alliance warfare, but the effects when used against a planet are notpretty).

The mysterious superweapon Jamyl Sarum deployed on the Minmatar fleet over Mekhios from her battleship, wiping it out completely and forcing the other two Minmatar fleets to retreat. The nature of the weapon is top secret: it is a reverse-engineered Terran device.

As of Dominion 1.1, Titans have been converted from mobile nukes into single-target Wave Motion Guns.

What Measure Is a Non-Super?: In space, if you're not a capsuleer, you life is worth nothing. Your family will not be notified of your death.

Wide Open Sandbox: To the point where participation in any of the NPC actions of the game is considered by a large group of players to have negative implications.

Wild Mass Guessing: Word of God is deliberately vague on whether the unknown space opened up in Apocrypha is the Milky Way, some other galaxy, or even Another Dimension. Were the sleepers human? Alien? Sentient machines? Are they truly extinct?

The Enheduanni. Introduced in one official short story as a secret adversary to the Jove embroiled in vast conspiracies, get credit by the Wild Mass Guessers for nearly every major world event, even those with other established story reasons. It's the Eve version of this wiki's Everyone's a secret Time Lord theories.

They also have a blanket ban on certain tactics, such as alt spies. Anyone caught using them is essentially barred from the Amarr/Minmatar RP community.

Wretched Hive: Definately Low Sec space and most of 0.0 space. Most of EVE in general, possibly, depending on your opinions of scamming and market manipulation.

Notable are Jita (the premier trade hub is overflowing with scammers and gankers), Rancer (a choke point in a low-sec pipeline shortcut from Jita to Rens, the Minmatar trade hub, cutting ten jumps off the hi-sec route but stiff with ruthless pirates), Aunenen (a low-sec choke to a resource-rich hi-sec "island" in Caldari territory, also heavily camped by pirates), and HED-GP (the primary entryway to southern null-sec from Amarr territory, whose entry stargate is usually a heavily-camped, warp-bubbled kill zone).

Thera, by design. A system in wormhole space (and thus has a -1.0 security rating) with a lot of connections to other systems that's always shifting due to the nature of wormholes. It's also the only w-space system with NPC stations, leading to station camping. Within hours of it opening it turned into a bloodbath.

Writers Cannot Do Math: Some of the age, density, mass and volume figures listed on stars, planets, and moons are utterly impossible. This is more Writers Not Trying To Do Math: they were created by a random generator program. People complain sometimes but no one has attempted fixing it yet. (It's been mentioned that it's a misplaced decimal point. Nothing to see here.)

A slow movement is beginning to show for this sort of thing, however. Beginning with canonically important worlds being locked out of the planetary interaction system, and in an update, many of the planets mentioned in the various stories around EVE have had their statistics corrected to within habitable ranges.

The Sansha attacks offer further illustrations of the trope. They involve Sansha battleships in the hundreds being lost to abduct tens of thousands. It sounds okay, until your remember that each NPC battleship has a crew of ten thousand. They're losing millions of crew to abduct tens of thousands of people, never mind material losses.

You Have Researched Breathing: Some of the skills have no logical justification except gameplay. Why do you need a skill to place standing buy orders on other stations even though you can remotely buy items already up for sale from the beginning? For some things you might be getting some kind of license or authorization

Up until December of 2010 it was imperative that you learned to learn. There were eleven learning skills, basic and advanced versions, in the game that raised corresponding attribute points, which in turn were and still are used for calculating the speed which you learn other skills at.

Zerg Rush: The tactic that really gave Goonswarm its name: instead of trying to win capital-on-capital wars, the early Goons fought by flying massive numbers of kamikaze frigates against enemy battle fleets, and while they died in droves, they still got in several kills against important enemy ships. Even more importantly from their perspective, the ammunition expended against each frigate cost more than the frigate itself. This particular tactic is generally not used anymore, but Goonswarm has established a Call Back doctrine of Caracal Fleets: light, cheap cruisers for people who just want to have some fun and wreck stuff.

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